Is there any reason to be optimistic about it, or are we all doomed? As far as I’ve looked it up, the more optimistic projections predict a 1-2° global temperature rise in the next few decades, which is pretty bad.
Is it a smart decision to start moving to higher/colder regions yet? What can we do?
And is there a good resource or video essay or whatever for this? There is so much misinformation and fearmongering around climate change. It’s a hassle to weed out any trustable information.
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It’s mass extinction level bad, but humans probably won’t go extinct. The humans who may live 200 years from now will have a much less beautiful world than we do.
This is the coldest year you will experience for the rest of your life, and this is the hottest year you’ve ever experienced.
There will be fewer humans, perhaps 5% of what we have now - that’s what I glimpse from all the literature. That is not good news: as life will be much less “developed” as a result.
There will be fewer humans, perhaps 5% of what we have now
Not in a mere 200 years. The human population of Earth will peak somewhere around 12B, and then likely stabilize at a few billion below that.
Two forces at work here: (1) humans will get fewer children, leading to leveling off (2) climate change, the exhaustion of resources, breakdown of our ecosystem will lead to hunger, disease and political disruption and culling of our species.
I think (1) will have a much bigger impact on the human population than (2). We aren’t going to exhaust Earth’s resources in 200 years, and it will take much less time than that to switch over to renewables. The transition is already underway, and shows no signs of stopping.
I admire your optimism, but I definitely do not share it . You should read this; https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0437324 There are many more scientific publications and newspaper articles and assessments about this topic - it looks very grim for humanity.
https://unsdg.un.org/latest/stories/climate-summit-2025-scaling-10-solutions-can-still-deliver
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165897
Highly recommend keeping up with climate.us, they’re good folks.
Have you had much of a background in the sciences? Interested in learning more about disinformation?
Thanks a bunch!
Interested in learning more about disinformation?
Sure, do you have something that’ll help me identify disinformation better?
Mostly it boils down to taking it slow and, depending on the medium, learning how to tell key signs.
Easiest is keeping to trusted scientific journals and news sources. Longer form media requires more study to determine genuine vs AI authorship and of course bias.
Short form media is often harder, but having a good idea about major regional goals, like certain countries for example that may be using botting to create movement towards a certain topic or belief, can help you to see potential biases.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/
If short form media is twitter takes and 60 second shorts, I have learned to almost immediately dismiss them until supported by more evidence.
And there’s also commercial social media algorithms that take advantage of their extensive data hoarding to stagnate and dogmatize opinions.
Mostly it boils down to taking it slow and, depending on the medium, learning how to tell key signs.
Then I guess it’s mostly just experience and intuition, like learning how to pirate stuff safely online.
To a good point yea, it’s experience based, it’s why the top schools are already exposing the topic of disinformation and media literacy to younger generations. Trust but verify is an excellent mantra, take time to properly think through and challenge new information you encounter, keep a change of pace to stay mentally fresh, destressing yourself when possible all work together to keep a healthy learning mindset.
It’s essentially a holistic approach to learning and processing.
Unfortunately, geopolitical interests, personal ideology, and everything in-between will make true online objectivity nearly impossible, so learning to best navigate it is pretty much the only approach for now. Besides keeping offline as much as possible.
However bad you think it is, it’s worse.
Mostly bad but with u certainty and some hope.
- We passed the 1.5°C threshold that was the goal to prevent the worst effects of climate change for 1-2 years although the threshold is defined as a 10 year average
- we busted through 7 of 9 extinction boundaries
- weather is clearly more extreme and impacting more and more of the population
- climate tipping points have a lot of uncertainty and take place over years so we don’t know until later that we’ve passed one. They are effectively irreversible. There’s a chance we have passed one or more
However carbon emissions have plateaued in quite a few countries. We do have technologies like solar, wind, grid storage, EVs that will have significant impact and are rolling out. It’s not enough and way too delayed but it’s a good start
If we don’t pass any climate tipping points or all the extinction boundaries, we can recover over a century or two
As the other commenters have already shared, things are going poorly. An issue with climate change is that concrete consequences are delayed behind our actions, there is already more warming baked in. But I worry about the focus on the binary good or bad outcome on climate change and the people who say things like “it’s too late.” (fossil fuel astroturfing pushes this phrase btw). Climate change is not binary and it’s never too late for us to try prevent worse things happening.
Despite unfavorable political winds in some developed countries, there’s progress in developing nations and, most importantly, India and China. China is spending nearly $1 trillion/year on green energy and infrastructure. They clearly want to dominate the global green energy economy. India is adding big solar capacity too. And solar is also taking off across Africa, where off-grid diesel generators are being directly replaced with small-scale solar systems. Since electricity for solar is now the cheapest form in many areas of the world, it often pays for itself and keeps increasing as an attractive investment.
We thankfully already have the most of the technology needed to address climate change (carbon-free energy, energy storage, better power grids, more forests and less cattle). And green tech keeps getting better, I like the channel Undecided with Matt Ferrell to keep up with tech advancements. But no technological progress will be enough if fossil fuel companies keep drilling. As things worsen, the political appetites will also certainly change.
It’s going bad in a place I thought would be more climate proof
We’ve reached a point of no return on many aspects of climate change. Over the decades the climate rhetoric of climatologists has changed from preventing climate change, to damage control.
It’s not going well on the latter either…
From humanities perspective: we are fucked and for the next few thousand years the average human wont have as comfortable a life as we had for the past decades.
For you personally: you will more likely be affected passively than actively. What I mean is your house will probably not be blown away by a tornado, but the amount of people it happens to will increase exponentially and so on average everyone will have to pay the price. Food will get way more expensive as crops will be harder to grow, immigration will boom as millions will lose their homes along coasts and flee from areas where living becomes impossible. This will probably lead to fascism booming even harder and wars breaking out all around the world.
I guess as long as you are prepared well enough and dont live in risky areas you will be able to live your life relatively comfortably, just for your kids’ generation to suffer 100 times as much as they would have had to if we just paid a little attention as a species.
